The Shape of Goodwill

There’s a story in the Canon of a king and queen who have a weak army, and their army is defeated by a neighboring king. So they flee the city. The neighboring king comes in and takes over everything. Meanwhile, they disguise themselves as wanderers. They take up residence in the capital of the other king because they have friends in the city there.

After a while, they have a child, and as the child begins to speak, they realize that keeping the child there is dangerous. They might be found at any time, and he would be killed along with them. So they send him to stay with relatives out in the countryside. He comes and visits them occasionally.

As he grows older, he comes in one day, only to find that they’ve been caught. They’re being paraded around the city. They’ve had their heads shaved off, and their arms are tied behind their backs. They’re being paraded around the city to the sound of a harsh drum on their way to being executed.

They see the young son, and the father says, “Don’t look too far. Don’t look too close. For animosity is not ended by animosity. It’s ended by non-animosity.”

The people hear this and they say, “What’s he saying? He’s gibbering nonsense.”

But the son realizes that the father is talking to him. So he goes off to hide.

After they’re executed — they’ve been drawn and quartered, guards have been placed over the bodies — he gets some alcohol, gets the guards drunk, and then cremates the parents.

The king, who’s on a terrace on the top of his palace, sees the cremation fire. He realizes, “There’s somebody who’s loyal to those people. This is a dangerous sign.”

The son goes off, mourns his parents for a while, then decides to get revenge. He comes back into the city, gets employment in the stables for the elephants in the palace, and at night he plays the lute for the elephants. That’s a detail I’ve always liked.

Well, the sound of the lute doesn’t stay in the stables. It wafts into the apartments of the king, and it sounds really good. So he calls for the young man and says, “Play the lute for me.” The young man plays as best he can, and then the king says, “Okay, from now on, you’re part of my staff.”

So the young man does his best to be loyal to the king. As they say in the stock phrase, he gets up in the morning before the king, goes to bed at night after the king, does everything the king requests. He gets more and more trusted until finally one day the two of them are off on a chariot ride. The king gets tired. He says, “Just sit down on the ground. I’ll lie down with my head in your lap. I need some rest.” And he falls asleep.

The young man realizes, “Now I have my chance.” He pulls out his sword. But then he thinks of the words his father said: “Don’t look too far. Don’t look too close. For animosity is not ended through animosity. It’s ended through non-animosity.” So he puts the sword back in the scabbard.

Then he starts thinking of all the harm he suffered from the hands of that king. He pulls out the sword again, thinks of his father’s words again, puts the sword back. This happens three times.

The king wakes up in fright. He’s had a horrible dream that the son of the king he had executed was going to murder him. So the young man holds the king by the hair, pulls out his sword, and says, “Do you know who I am? I am that son.”

So the king pleads for his life. And the young man says, “No, I have to plead for my life.” So they agree that they’re not going to harm each other. The story ends up with the son marrying the daughter of the king. That tale of revenge ends with non-revenge.

The Buddha told this story to a group of monks who had gotten into a quarrel over some very minor things. And he added, “There are noble warriors who live by the sword, yet even they can show forgiveness. Why can’t you?”

It’s a good story to keep in mind, because revenge ricochets back and forth around the world here: One side harms another, the second side harms the first, and they go back and forth from lifetime after lifetime. Who knows how long this has been going on? When you keep that perspective in mind, you realize that you shouldn’t look too close, look too far. You end animosity through non-animosity.

“Not looking too close” means that you don’t focus on the faults of people who are near to you. “Don’t look too far” means that you don’t hold old grudges, don’t hold animosity in mind.

We see the world struggling around us. It’s not a question of which side to side with, because both sides are wrong. Nothing is worth killing other people for. All you can do is have goodwill, realizing that someday this current iteration of the back and forth is going to stop, and there’s going to be a lot of cleaning up to do. That’s when you can play a positive role. In the meantime, have lots of goodwill for both sides.

Years back, we had a Thai army officer come and visit us here. There had been a military coup in Thailand, there had been demonstrations against it, and the army had decided to open fire on the demonstrators. The king found out about this, called both sides in, gave them a stern lecture, and the military men were out. The people who were fighting the military men: They were out, too. The military officer who had given the order to fire suddenly found himself without a job.

He showed up here in San Diego to visit his daughter, who was studying at one of the universities here. The Thai people in San Diego said, “Okay, we’re going to have a dinner in honor of him, but we’re not going to mention the events.” But that’s all the guy could talk about: how much he regretted his decision.

So they brought him up here the next morning to talk to Ajaan Suwat. This was right after the meal. We sat there for two hours as Ajaan Suwat gave him some very good advice.

Then, after the military man left, he turned to me and said, “You know, if he hadn’t been punished for his decision, he wouldn’t have come to the monastery.” But still, he was willing to give the man good advice.

So you don’t let your goodwill be determined by who’s right or who’s wrong, who’s good or who’s bad. The Buddha’s image for the practice of goodwill is of a man who blows a conch trumpet. Back in those days, that’s how you called people together. You took a conch shell, cut off one of the ends to make it into a trumpet. And when you blew the trumpet, of course—as with any trumpet—the sound would go in all directions. It wouldn’t go just to good people. It wouldn’t go just to people you like. It wouldn’t go in one direction and not in others. It goes in all directions to all people.

That’s the shape of immeasurable goodwill: all around. It encompasses everyone, because we realize that all of us here in the human realm have made mistakes. We all have good karma and bad karma. As for people who are being cruel right now, you realize that they’re going to suffer. They’re creating a lot of bad karma for themselves. So you have to have compassion for them.

Now, they may not care for your compassion, in which case you have to back up your compassion and goodwill with equanimity. But goodwill always has to be there, realizing that for them to be happy, they have to learn to stop acting in unskillful ways. If there’s anything you can do to help them in that direction, you’re happy to help. If not, you have to make sure at the very least that you don’t get involved in unskillful actions—because that’s where your first responsibility is.

This may sound like a narrow attitude, but it’s not. If you set a good example through your actions, that’s the best way to teach other people to be good. It means a lot more than just words. You show others that we can live in this world without having to fight back and forth.

As the Buddha said, loss in terms of your relatives, loss in terms of your health, loss in terms of your wealth: Those forms of loss are not important. You don’t go to hell because you lose those things. The serious loss is loss of your right view and loss of your virtue, because you can go to hell if you lose those things.

The fortunate thing, though, is that you don’t have to lose those things. Eventually you will lose your health, you will lose your wealth, you will lose your relatives. That’s a normal part of life. But you don’t have to lose your right view and you don’t have to lose your virtue. Nobody can take them away from you. You lose them only if you throw them away.

Now, we see all too many people throwing their virtue away, throwing their right view away. We see other people being careless with their true wealth, inner wealth. But there’s no need for that. As long as you maintain your genuine wealth—i.e., your right view and your virtue—you keep yourself safe, and you’re giving safety to others.

Now, other people may harm you physically, they may harm those you love physically, but the harm they do in those ways doesn’t take you down.

You have to realize that as we live in this world, it’s not a place where we can stay. We’re moving through. We can leave good things behind, in terms of the example we set, the generosity we practice, the virtue we practice. But we have to ask ourselves, “How many times do you want to keep coming back?”

Those chants we had just now, the four Dhamma summaries: They come from a time when a king was asking a monk, “Why did you ordain?” The monk explains that he’d heard these Dhamma summaries from the Buddha. They’re about aging, illness, and death—and the parallel fact that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self.

The king asks for an explanation, so the monk asks the king, “Are you as strong as you used to be?”

“Well, no.” He’s 80 years old now. He used to be strong when he was young, but now there are times when he means to put his foot in one place, and it goes someplace else.

“How about your illnesses? Do you have any recurring illnesses?”

“Yes,” the king says, “I have a recurring wind illness,” which means shooting pains throughout the body. “Sometimes I’m lying in bed in pain, and my relatives and courtiers are saying to one another, ‘Maybe this time he’s going to go. Maybe this time he’s going to go.’” Imagine that: being a king, and hearing your relatives and courtiers — the people who are supposed to depend on you — looking forward to your death.

The monk says, “Can you order them to share out some of your pain, so that you don’t have to feel so much on your own?”

“Well, no,” the king says. “I have to feel it all alone.” That’s the meaning of the summary, “The world offers no shelter.”

Then there’s the reflection that nothing’s really your own. The king says, “I have huge stores of gold and silver. What do you mean, I have nothing of my own?”

The monk asks him, “Can you take that gold and silver with you when you die?”

“No.”

So here the king has been made to reflect on aging, illness, and death. But then the monk asks him, “Suppose someone reliable were to come and say there’s a kingdom to the east with a weak army. Your stronger army could take that kingdom, and all of its wealth would be yours. Would you take it?”

“Sure.”

“How about a kingdom to the west?”

“Yes.”

“To the north?”

“Yes.”

“To the south?”

“Yes.”

“On the other side of the ocean?”

“Yes.”

He’s heartless and blind.

We suffer from aging, illness, and death, but we keep coming back for more, because our greed is insatiable. As the Buddha said, even a shower of gold coins wouldn’t be enough for one person’s sensual desires. You think you’d get enough, but the more material wealth you have, the more you think you want. There’s no end to it.

The end comes when you decide you’re not going to be looking for your happiness out there in the world. You’re going to look for your happiness inside. This is where the quest for happiness is safe.

As the Buddha saw before he went off into the wilderness, you look everywhere in the world, and all you see is that somebody’s already laid claim to everything in the world. If you’re going to find your happiness in the world, you have to fight other people off. But if you look inside your own heart, train your own heart, that’s your territory. You don’t have to fight other people off. And that’s where genuine happiness is found.

It’s not a case of saying, “Well, I can’t get what I want in the world, so I’ll just make do with what I can find inside.” It turns out what you find inside is much more valuable. It’s actually unconditioned: totally free from limitation of any kind. That’s what we can find inside.

So we’re not putting up with second best. We’re actually finding something that’s way better than anything the world has to offer. And when we’ve found that, everything we offer to the world is a pure gift. It looks like we’re just looking after ourselves, but in looking after ourselves, we have a lot to offer the world as well.

So look after the state of your mind. As the Buddha said, when you take the precepts, not only do you not break the precepts, but you also don’t get other people to break the precepts, and you don’t condone other people for breaking the precepts. Which means when there’s killing, you can’t condone anybody killing anybody else. You realize it’s none of your business.

Your business is inside. Take care of that first. Then you have something of genuine value to offer to others: a happiness without any animosity. As the Buddha said, we delight in the fact that our path leads to what’s unafflicted and free from conflict. So find your delight here.